This Side of Glory by Gwen Bristow Page B

she did and good-naturedly let Him have His way. When Fred and Eleanor first came home Molly said of Kester only that she had not met the gentleman and therefore had no opinion, and her husband and daughter spoke of him with such contradictory violence that she could not form one. After he had been down to see Eleanor several times Molly said he was a mighty pleasant young man, but she’d hesitate before she’d marry a planter who left his cotton so often right in the middle of planting time just to see a girl who wrote him every day anyway. Noticing that Eleanor had her mind made up, Molly was thereafter silent on the subject.
    Eleanor blessed her mother’s calmness, but she was so eager to escape Fred’s troubled eyes that she would have been willing to be married in the courthouse at once. Kester, however, had assumed that their engagement would be properly announced in the New Orleans Picayune and that they would be married in her father’s house by a minister. Eleanor finally had to tell him, one day when they were lunching at Antoine’s, that Fred was so opposed to their marriage she did not believe he would consent to having it performed in his home. Kester was at first amazed, then he burst out laughing uncontrollably, and finally, when she insisted upon knowing what was so ridiculous about a situation that was racking her nerves beyond endurance, he told her his parents were also convinced the marriage would be disastrous, but for different reasons.
    Eleanor was angry. “That pair of eggshells!” she blazed.
    “That’s why I won’t run off to any justice of the peace,” Kester ended. “I want you worse than I ever wanted anything, but I’m going to marry you like a man who’s proud of what he’s doing.” He began to laugh again.
    “I was never so mad in my life,” Eleanor exclaimed, “and it’s not funny.”
    Kester was shaking with mirth. “But it is, my darling, it is funny. Your father thinking the Larnes were blessing heaven for the infusion of some fresh red blood into their weary veins, my father thinking the Upjohns were gloating over the prospect of getting my precious name into their chronicles—and you and I not thinking of anything but how much we love each other and how we wish they’d leave us alone.”
    At that Eleanor laughed too. As Kester said it, the opposing viewpoints of their families did sound foolish. “What is it they say,” she asked after awhile, wonderingly, “‘two shall be born the whole wide world apart’—”
    “I think everybody must have gone mad but us,” said Kester. Ignoring the uneaten half of his crêpes suzette, he asked the waiter for a check. “Come on,” he said, “I’ll attend to your father.”
    He did attend to Fred, with a gay serenity that Eleanor began to think it must have taken six generations to produce. They went into Fred’s office, where Kester stood facing Fred across the desk and calmly stated that he was going to marry Eleanor.
    “I’m sorry you don’t like me,” he went on, “but I’m going to marry her anyway. We’re both of age and don’t have to ask anybody’s permission. But I happen to be a man who likes the pleasant traditions. I want to be married in her father’s house and have him say ‘I do’ when the minister asks who gives her away.”
    Fred crossed his hands on the desk and his eyes met Kester’s. “You’re mighty confident of yourself, young man, aren’t you?”
    “Why, yes sir,” said Kester. “I am.”
    “Mhm. I am too,” returned Fred. “I don’t like her marrying you, and I don’t like pretending in public that I do.”
    Kester grinned coolly. “You’re a stubborn man, Mr. Upjohn,” he remarked, “used to bossing everybody around you. But this time you might as well acknowledge that you’ve lost, and it’s your own fault.”
    “My fault?”
    “Certainly,” said Kester. “I suppose it didn’t occur to you when Eleanor was born that she could be just as stubborn as you are,